


Alternative Media Studies

by Riona



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-03-08 07:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3200621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riona/pseuds/Riona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abed won't stop insisting they've been cancelled. Jeff just wants to get home.</p>
<p>(Set after <i>Community</i>'s post-s5 cancellation, before Yahoo! picked it up. Obnoxiously meta, if 'set after <i>Community</i>'s cancellation' wasn't enough of a warning sign.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alternative Media Studies

**Author's Note:**

> Footnotes are in the author's notes at the end. Er, yes, I'm afraid there are footnotes. I'm sorry. I did warn you that this was going to be obnoxiously meta. I hope you enjoy it regardless!

He doesn’t know how he got here. He doesn’t know where ‘here’ is. It’s some kind of featureless grey town, and it seems abandoned, and he never seems to reach the end of it. There are no mountains in the distance; there’s nothing he can focus on and go _okay, that’s not this town, I can aim for that_. He’s been walking for what feels like hours. He hasn’t seen anyone. His phone is dead.

A lot of the stores have ‘Greydale’ in the name. He guesses that must be what this place is called.

From now on, Jeff is staying out of dales. Anything with ‘dale’ in the name is bad news.

-

Jeff is about ready to give up, sit down and wait for the outside world to come to _him_ when something catches his eye.

It’s a little electronics store. There’s a display of old CRT televisions in the front window. One of them is on.

One of them is on?

He can see from here that it’s just showing static, but he gets closer anyway. There’s electricity in this place?

And then the static clears, and he freezes.

It’s his study group. Or, okay, the parts of the Save Greendale committee that _used_ to be his study group, but he’s never really stopped thinking of them as his study group. The picture is still unstable and staticky, but it’s definitely them, sitting around the table in the study room. He and Abed aren’t there.

Why is this television playing footage of his study group? Who the hell set this up? Does someone know he’s here?

And then Annie looks right at the camera.

“ _Jeff!_ ” she yelps.

“Huh?” Jeff asks, and then he jerks forward, pressing his hands against the cracked window. “You can see me?”

The moment he says it, he realises how stupid it is. This must be footage he filmed, even if he doesn’t remember it. He’s behind the camera Annie’s looking at, and she’s yelling at him because he’s staring at her boobs or something. In his defence, they do kind of draw the eye.

What this means is that he’s just tried to talk to a television like an idiot. He needs to balance this out by doing something cool right now.

The TV’s on, so this store has electricity. Can he charge his phone here? Do some cool-guy texting?

Yeah, okay, an abandoned store selling TVs this old probably isn’t going to have a modern cellphone charger in stock.

It takes him a moment to register that Annie is talking non-stop on the screen. “ _Can you hear us? What happened? You just disappeared. Abed went looking for you. We’ve been really worried!_ ”

“ _No offence,_ ” Troy says, shifting his chair away from the camera, “ _but are you a ghost?_ ”

“You actually _can_ see me?” Jeff demands, his throat suddenly so tight he can barely get the words out.

“ _We can see you,_ ” Britta says. “ _Jeff, where are you?_ ”

“I need you guys to get me out of here,” Jeff says. “I’m in Gr—”

But there’s a _click_ as he says it, and the screen goes dark.

Jeff just stares at it for a moment.

“Greydale,” he says, quietly, just in case they can still hear him on their end.

-

It’s the same story with every television he comes across. His friends are there, he can see them, he can get their attention, but the screen always cuts out before he can tell them where he is.

He’s screaming at a blank monitor when he hears a voice from behind him.

“Personally, I think this symbolism is a little heavy-handed.”

Jeff whirls around. “Abed! Oh, thank God. You need to show me the way out of here.”

“In a metaphorical sense, I may be able to do that,” Abed says. “If by ‘here’ you mean your current state of denial.”

Abed’s already not making sense, and Jeff is so glad to see someone else he barely cares. “Any chance you could literally show me the way out of my current state of being cold and hungry and not able to use my phone?”

“You need to face the truth, Jeff,” Abed says. “We’ve been cancelled.”

“Abed,” Jeff says, “you can be as weird as you like when we’re back at Greendale.”

“You’ll never reach Greendale if you don’t accept our cancellation. We need to talk about it now.”

By this point, Jeff’s elation is starting to wear off. It couldn’t have been Shirley who came to rescue him?

“We have not been cancelled,” Jeff says. “This is not a TV show; these are our lives. People don’t get cancelled.” He gestures in the direction Abed isn’t facing. “Is that the way you came from?”

Abed glances behind him and nods. Jeff starts walking in that direction.

Abed walks alongside him. Not, it turns out, to give helpful how-to-get-out-of-here advice.

“I took it pretty hard too,” Abed says. “All we needed was one more season and a movie. But we can’t just keep waiting for a season that’ll never come.”

“First, we’re not a TV show,” Jeff says.

“Not any more. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Second,” Jeff says, “if we _were_ a TV show, I’m pretty sure no network would be stupid enough to abandon these abs. Third, you need to let go of your ‘six seasons and a movie’ crap, because I’m starting to feel like it’s some kind of curse that explains why I’m still stuck at Greendale when I’ve finished my stupid degree.”

“I’ve already let go of it,” Abed says. “The question is when _you’re_ going to let go of it.”

Jeff throws up his hands. “Okay. If I’m really a TV character and my show’s been cancelled, I guess I should have just ceased to exist, right? I mean, TV characters don’t exist outside their show. But I’m still here. Maybe I’m not at Greendale, but I’m _somewhere_. And I can find my way back, or I _would_ be able to if you could just _help me_.”

“I don’t know, Jeff,” Abed says. “This doesn’t seem like the same medium. Can’t you feel it?”

This doesn’t seem like a promising turn in the conversation. “Feel what?” Jeff asks, reluctantly.

“The narration of your thoughts and actions. The lack of detail in the world. I mean, there’s been no description for this entire conversation. We’ve just been walking through a void.” They pause and look around at the abandoned street, grey and empty and silent. “Okay, now the author’s getting selfconscious, but there was definitely nothing here before.”

“The author,” Jeff says, flatly.

“This feels like a textual medium,” Abed says. “Don’t you think so? I mean, look.” He lowers his voice.1

“No,” Jeff says. “You can’t.”2

“I guess you’ll have to get out of the footnotes, then,” Jeff says.

“Fine,” Abed says, in his normal tone of voice, insofar as the word ‘normal’ can be applied to anything Abed says or does. “But the world has changed. This whole thing is from your point of view. When we were a TV show, the perspective would shift. There were storylines without you.”

“There were?” Jeff asks, surprised and wounded for just an instant before remembering that his life has _never_ been a TV show and Abed is being ridiculous.

“If everything’s from your point of view, you have no way of knowing whether I’m real,” Abed says. “You don’t know what I’m thinking. You don’t know whether I’m thinking anything at all. Maybe I only exist in your head. My working theory is some kind of hallucinatory breakdown brought on by our cancellation.”

“I hate to break this to you,” Jeff says, “but not hearing other people’s thoughts isn’t actually all that rare.”

“There was that time I went to the darkest timeline in that other episode that was just your hallucination,” Abed says, thoughtfully. “So I guess even having scenes from my perspective isn’t a guarantee that I’m real.”

“Abed,” Jeff says, wearily, and then he cuts himself off. “Wait. I never told you about that. How do you know about that?”

Abed tilts his head. “Huh. I guess I really _am_ just in your imagination.”

“You’re not – you’re not _imaginary_ , Abed,” Jeff says fiercely, because if Abed’s imaginary that means he’s still on his own in this place, and that’s not something he’s prepared to handle right now. “You must’ve heard it from my therapist or something.”

Abed shrugs. “Okay.”

Jeff doesn’t ask how or when Abed spoke to his therapist. Not because he’s scared Abed’s going to disappear or something. That’s not going to happen. He just... doesn’t need to know. “So are we going in the right direction?”

“I’m still not sure you’ve accepted this medium change.”

“ _Literally_ ,” Jeff growls. “Are we _literally_ going in the right direction?”

“Think back to the visions of the group you’ve been seeing on the televisions,” Abed says.

Jeff presses his hands over his face, then takes them away. “Wait. Visions, plural? Did I tell you there was more than one? When did you show up?”

“Maybe I heard about them from your therapist.”

Fine. He’ll accept that. Abed has somehow heard about all this from Jeff’s therapist in the future and travelled back in time. Fine. So long as he’s real.

“Didn’t anything seem odd about them? Other than the fact you could communicate through the screen, obviously. It’s going to complicate things if that’s how televisions work in our new universe. Horror movies will never get anywhere if the characters can hear our advice.”

Jeff frowns. Tries to think back. Something _has_ been bothering him, he realises now.

“Troy was there,” he says, slowly. He just wants to accept it, for some reason, but he _forces_ himself to question this. “Didn’t Troy leave? Did he come back?”

“Maybe,” Abed says. “Or maybe it’s the medium. Writing for TV means writing around all kinds of obstacles. Actors have lives, needs, obligations, pregnancies. Sometimes you have to put a character on a bus. If you’re not writing for the screen, you don’t have those problems. You can include whatever characters you want to.”

Jeff stares at him. “So this is about Troy. You don’t want to believe he’d leave you of his own free will, so you’ve decided that Troy had to leave because his actor got pregnant.”

“Or Troy left of his own free will, and now he’s come back,” Abed says, with a shrug. “But which seems more likely?”

It _does_ seem pretty unlikely that Troy would just leave his soulmate, but Jeff still thinks it’s slightly more plausible than the alternative. Not a lot. But slightly.

“Pierce could come back,” Abed says. “We might never know he was gone.”

Jeff shivers. “Don’t say that. That’s creepy.”

“This isn’t canon. Our universe isn’t bound by the same rules any more. I’m hoping that the Inspector will show up and take me as his assistant.”

“Right,” Jeff says. “Personally, I just want to get home. You think this story of yours can manage that?”

“Your home was on a network, Jeff,” Abed says. “But they don’t want you any more.”

Jeff is getting very, very tired of this. “Screw the network. I don’t _need_ to be renewed, or whatever. I just need to get home. I need my friends. I don’t care if we’re TV or text or a videogame or a charming illustration on a fifteenth-century tapestry. As far as I’m concerned, this feels a lot like real life, and I’d like to _spend_ that life somewhere other than this void.”

He looks around. The streets are cold and empty.

“This... this town,” he says, a little uncertainly.

“And you can,” Abed says. “But first you have to accept your situation. Fortunately, I happen to be here with the most persuasive person I know.”

“Annie’s here?” Jeff asks, startled, before he realises what Abed is getting at. “You want me to give _myself_ an inspirational speech?”

“It’s what you need,” Abed says. “At times of change, we’re comforted by what’s familiar to us. What’s familiar to you is your own voice.”

He can’t argue with that. Maybe this is a stupid idea, but it probably _would_ feel good to hear himself talking like he has everything figured out. He takes a breath.

“Not that you’ll really be hearing your own voice,” Abed says, “because this is a textual medium.”

“Abed,” Jeff says.

“Sorry.”

“All right, let’s say I believe you,” Jeff says. “We were the characters in a TV show, and then our show was cancelled, and now we only exist in books or whatever—”

“Amateur Internet fiction,” Abed puts in, quietly.

“Amat— what? That’s a thing? About us?” He shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter. What’s important is that we _still exist_. We can still talk to each other and make out with the wrong people and get dragged into weirdly intense college competitions. Maybe it won’t be the same, but we’ve been through changes before and we’ve survived.” He hesitates. “Most of us.”

He opens his eyes. He doesn’t remember closing them, but he opens his eyes.

He’s in the study room, and Annie is smiling nervously at him from across the table.

“Well,” she says, “that speech... didn’t really make any sense, but you’re awake again, so yay!”

“It made sense to me,” Abed says. “You’re saying the network’s dropped us, right? I knew something had changed. But you’re right; that doesn’t have to be the end. Plus Netflix could always pick us up. Or Yahoo!’s video service.”

“The network didn’t drop us,” Jeff says. He puts a hand on the table, just to make sure it’s there, just to make sure this is real. “I was just saying that stuff to shut the you in my head up. And since when did Yahoo! have a video service?”

“Jeffrey,” Shirley says, taking her ‘concerned and gentle’ voice to such intense levels that Jeff is suddenly convinced he’s bleeding to death in front of them, “are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine,” Jeff says, after a quick glance down at himself to confirm that his blood is, in fact, still where he likes to keep it. “What, is it a bad sign not to know Yahoo! does television now? I didn’t even know Yahoo! still existed. Wasn’t it wiped out with the dinosaurs?”

“What?” Troy demands. “I remember Yahoo!! Dinosaurs were still around then? And I _missed_ them?”

“Uh, it’s more the fact that you were passed out for two hours,” Britta says.

Oh. Okay. That makes sense.

Wait.

“ _Two hours?_ ” he asks. “And you just left me here in the study room? You just sat here and watched? Nobody moved me or called an ambulance or anything?”

“We moved you!” Annie protests.

“And then you moved me _back?_ ”

“You didn’t pass out in the study room,” Abed says. “You were in the infirmary for your prescription, remember?”

Jeff stares.

“We had to sneak you out,” Troy says. “That nurse did _not_ want you to leave.”

Jeff stares some more.

“I thought it’d make more narrative sense for you to regain consciousness at your study table, surrounded by your friends,” Abed explains. “Infirmaries and hospitals are bad places to be when you’re unconscious. If you wake up at all, it’s fifty-fifty whether you’ll be fine or just have time to tell us you love us before your emotionally-manipulative death.”

Jeff transfers his stare to Annie. “You _bought_ this?”

Annie shifts uncomfortably. “It, uh, it seemed a lot more convincing at the time. I was panicking! You were unconscious!”

“Whatever,” Jeff says. “I’m fine. I’m still alive, despite my friends’ best efforts to murder me, and now we can move on.” Into the world of amateur Internet fiction, apparently.

No. _Not_ into the world of amateur Internet fiction. Into a world where he isn’t trapped in his own hallucination with Abed driving him crazy. It’s a relief to realise that, even if his only companion _wasn’t_ real, it’s only because the place he was trapped in wasn’t real either.

But something’s still bothering him. Something’s changed.

“Troy,” he says, frowning, “did you...?”

But Abed is shaking his head at him.

“Huh?” Troy asks.

“Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing, Jeff,” Abed says. “The more we play with it, the more we risk forcing the author to declare this a dream sequence. Let’s not press too hard on this.”

Jeff shrugs. “Okay. Whatever. I’m glad you’re here, Troy.”

Troy stares at him. “Where else would I be?”

“Does anyone else not know what the hell is going on?” asks Pierce.3

**Author's Note:**

> 1 “I can speak in footnotes now.”  
> 2 “You can’t respond to the footnotes,” Abed says. “They’re not meant to be required reading; they’re supplementary.”  
> 3 “Hey,” Troy says, “you’re right! This feels totally different.”4  
> 4 “And we can respond to each other like this,” Abed says. “It’s probably frowned upon by some style guides, but I think we can get away with it.”5  
> 5 “This is so awesome.”6 7  
> 6 “Troy and Abed in the footnotes!”  
> 7 “Troy and Abed in the footnotes!”


End file.
